Maths Snacks – Your ideas

Maths Snacks – Your ideas

Thanks to all those that sent in an idea snacks in response to this post. Here are those we had sent in.

‘I use PowerPoint to great effect in helping children understand and visualize geometrical problems, such as to demonstrate that the area of a triangle is 1/2h*b. Have the triangle and the rectangle of height h and base b next to it. Then, overlap the triangle on the rectangle and slice off half of the rectangle to leave only the triangle you started off with. Even better, get your pupils to make these animations, e.g. a parallelogram as the area of the relevant rectangle’Thanks Alessio

‘I use a lot of online manipulatives when introducing or exploring math concepts. They allow for inquiry that would not otherwise be possible in the classroom because of limited time and/or resources.

Kids and Cookies is one of my favorites. I use it to introduce the concept of fractions in a problem based way by asking the students to figure out how an even number of kids can share an uneven number of cookies equally. I describe the lesson in this free fractions ebook: www.starrmatica.com/ebooks . Another of my favourite sites houses probability spinners. The spinner parts can be adjusted to meet the needs of any level, and spins can be recorded on a graph to show results. Spinning a spinner 100 times and then 1000 times stimulates a discussion of theoretically probability versus experimental probability.’ Thanks Emily

‘Probably, the most exciting maths activities I have done with my class are to explore Fractals. The internet is full of freesoftware and websites, that can allow your pupils to explore and experiment with these fascinatingmathematical objects.

I also use the drawing tools in PowerPoint to create and explore Tangrams . Once pupils had created their own puzzle design, they could animate it using the animation tools. Thanks Bobby.

Thanks to those who contributed to last weeks Maths snack. The exclusive Partners in Learning computer bag is on it's way to you.

If you have some great ideas of how you use technology in different subjects, then let us know your ‘snack’. Next week’s subject snack will be on using technology to support foreign language teaching, so get thinking and we are looking forward to receiving your ideas.